Journal of Near-Death Studies
2010
Ken R. Vincent
Abstract: Near-death experiences (NDEs) and other transpersonal experiences -- those that transcend the usual personal experiential limits of space and/or time -- point to the existence and nature of God and ongoing personal consciousness following physical death. In this article, I review the history of these experiences prior to 1850 and of their study during three periods of scientific...
Sleep
2010
Sophie Schwartz
5 citations
WHAT GOES THROUGH OUR MINDS WHILE WE FALL ASLEEP? AT SLEEP ONSET, STUDENTS PREPARING FOR EXAMS COMMONLY RE-EXPERIENCE SOME OF the material they have been revising during the day; lovers have pervasive thoughts about their romantic partner; software developers may see bits of programming codes unfold in their mind's eye. These anecdotal observations suggest that, during the transition from...
heiDOK (Heidelberg University)
2010
Janice Brooks, Jay Vogelsong
Commentary on "The neurobiology of consciousness: Lucid dreaming wakes up" by J. Allan Hobson, with notes on other commentaries
Frontiers in Psychology
2010
Jeroen J A Van Boxtel, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Christof Koch
Recent research has slowly corroded a belief that selective attention and consciousness are so tightly entangled that they cannot be individually examined. In this review, we summarize psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence for a dissociation between top-down attention and consciousness. The evidence includes recent findings that show subjects can attend to perceptually invisible...
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
2010
David T Schmit
Contemporary interest in Asian meditation raises questions about when Westerners began investigating these practices. A synopsis of Western-originating scientific meditation research is followed by a brief introduction to mesmerism. Next, the unappreciated ways the mesmerists explored Oriental mind powers is recounted. How the mesmerists' cultural positioning, philosophy, and interest in...
Explore
2010
Stephan A. Schwartz
Two hundred years of reductive materialism has failed to explain the extraordinary experiences we know as moments of genius, religious epiphany, and psychic insight. This paper proposes that these three experiences are in essence the same experience, differentiated only by intention and context. It reaches this conclusion based on well-conducted experimental research across the continuum of...
History of the Human Sciences
2010
Thomas Sturm, Falk Wunderlich
We argue that Kant's views about consciousness, the mind-body problem and the status of psychology as a science all differ drastically from the way in which these topics are conjoined in present debates about the prominent idea of a science of consciousness. Kant never used the concept of consciousness in the now dominant sense of phenomenal qualia; his discussions of the mind-body problem...
Perspectives in biology and medicine
2010
Lukas Van Oudenhove, Stefaan E. Cuypers
Parallel to psychiatry, "philosophy of mind" investigates the relationship between mind (mental domain) and body/brain (physical domain). Unlike older forms of philosophy of mind, contemporary analytical philosophy is not exclusively based on introspection and conceptual analysis, but also draws upon the empirical methods and findings of the sciences. This article outlines the conceptual...
History of the Human Sciences
2010
Nicolas Langlitz
32 citations
The elimination of subjectivity through brain research and the replacement of so-called "folk psychology" by a neuroscientifically enlightened worldview and self-conception has been both hoped for and feared. But this cultural revolution is still pending. Based on nine months of fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research since the "Decade of the Brain," this paper examines how subjective...
History of the Human Sciences
2010
Eugene Taylor
10 citations
Throughout his career, William James defended personal consciousness. In his "Principles of Psychology" (1890), he declared that psychology is the scientific study of states of consciousness as such and that he intended to presume from the outset that the thinker was the thought. But while writing it, he had been investigating a dynamic psychology of the subconscious, which found a major place...